1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to communication systems, and, more particularly, to wireless communication systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Base stations in wireless communication systems provide wireless connectivity to users within the geographic area, or cell, associated with the base station. The wireless communication links between the base station and each of the users typically includes one or more downlink (or forward) channels for transmitting information from the base station to the mobile unit and one or more uplink (or reverse) channels for transmitting information from the mobile unit to the base station. Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques may be employed when the base station and, optionally, the user terminals include multiple antennas. For example, a base station that includes multiple antennas can transmit multiple independent and distinct signals to multiple users concurrently and on the same frequency band. MIMO techniques are capable of increasing the spectral efficiency of the wireless communication system roughly in proportion to the number of antennas available at the base station. However, the base station also requires information about the state of the downlink channel(s) to each of the users to select users that have approximately orthogonal downlink channels for concurrent transmission. The channel feedback may be provided by the users on the reverse link, but this increases overhead associated with the MIMO transmissions, which reduces the spectral efficiency of the wireless communication system.
Random fluctuations in the channel states can create sets of downlink channels that are approximately orthogonal. Thus, if the number of users associated with a base station is large, these random fluctuations naturally tend to create groups of users that have approximately orthogonal downlink channels. Opportunistic MIMO schemes identify these groups of users so that the interference between the concurrent transmissions from the base station to the users in the selected group is within an acceptable tolerance level. For example, let nT denote the number of transmit antennas at the base station and let K indicate the number of users connected to the base station. Each user is equipped with nR receive antennas. The channel coefficients between each transmit antenna and each receive antenna at user k can be assembled into an nR×nT matrix Hk, k=1, . . . , K.
In a multi-user MIMO system that employs linear unitary pre-coding matrices, the base station can transmit concurrently to as many as nT users, which can be chosen from the population of K users. The relationship between transmit and receive signals can be represented as:y=HUs+n   (1)where s is an nT-dimensional vector containing the transmit signals, y is the nR-dimensional vector of received signals, n is an nR-dimensional noise vector, and U is an nT×nT unitary pre-coding matrix, i.e., a matrix satisfying UUH=I. Note that some of the entries of s may be zero if the base station chooses to transmit to less than nT users (this is sometimes termed “rank adaptation”). Each base station typically stores a codebook consisting of L pre-coding matrices, Ui, i=1, . . . , L. Altogether, the L pre-coding matrices amount to nT·L column vectors, where each column vector has nT entries.
The pre-coding matrices map the signals onto the available channels. The base station can vary this mapping to adapt to the channel conditions by selecting different pre-coding matrices based on the base station's knowledge of the matrices Hk, k=1, . . . , K. Information about the matrix Hk, can be reported to the base station using feedback from the mobile unit. For example, when the base station implements an opportunistic scheme, each user periodically reports a preferred subset of the column vectors in the codebook via the reverse link to the base station. The users also report a quality indicator corresponding to a hypothetical transmission associated with each preferred column. The size of the subset of columns that can be selected and reported by each user is a parameter that can be anywhere between 1 and nT·L. For each pre-coding matrix Ui in the codebook, the base station identifies those users that have expressed preference for a column vector from that matrix Ui and associates those users with that matrix Ui. Only one user can be associated with each column, so if several users have expressed preference for the same column vector of that matrix Ui, only one of those users is retained in the association (this can be done randomly or based on priorities). Thus, there are at most nT users associated with each matrix Ui. Note that each user could be associated with multiple pre-coding matrices Ui.
The base station selects one of the pre-coding matrices, e.g. on the basis of priorities of the users associated with the matrices Ui. The priorities can be determined by a scheduler in the base station. Once the matrix and associated users have been identified, the base station can begin concurrent transmission to the selected users using the corresponding pre-coding matrix Ui. Although the performance could be expected to improve with growing L and the corresponding increase in the granularity of the pre-coding, the contrary has been shown to be the case, i.e., the performance of the system degrades with growing L. As L grows while the total number of users K remains constant, the probability that several users will select a column in the same pre-coding matrix diminishes and vanishes for L→∞. Thus, when L is very large the base station ends up transmitting mostly to one user at a time, thereby forfeiting the multiuser MIMO advantage.